


The Noise That Keeps Me Awake

by mumuinc



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bank Robbery, M/M, This is basically The Bank Job starring TRC characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-21 21:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8260907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: “We could rob your bank,” Ronan said quietly. The corners of his lips lifted in a smile that cut across his sharp features. He held out his glass and Gansey poured the shot, unable to contain himself.“It has to be untraceable. None of this must get back to me.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, AU. I love you so much, I can't stop writing you.
> 
> This fanfic is an amalgam of 2 films: The Thomas Crown Affair, where I took the Gansey character, and The Bank Job. The title comes from Garbage's _Push It_.

It was 2 in the morning when he got the call.

Richard Gansey III arrived in his DC apartment sometime around midnight. Instead of taking the private jet from Maine, he’d decided to catch a red-eye commercial flight instead. The summer had been lazy, uninteresting. Uninspired. He originally planned to stay the entire three months of summer. Barely three weeks in, he was already fully of it. His shoulder blades and back were sunburned from sea kayaking and surfing almost every morning he was there. He explored all of the lighthouses when he was eight, but he had gamely returned to them only to come out bemused and a little bored. He thought the summer, like previous summers spent in different coastal states, would have helped him through his boredom. But every year, it got worse.

He was twenty-four this year. He realized at this age, most people would have just been fresh out of college. They would still be in that first job high. They’d be working off student loans with entry-level white collar, secretarial work. Some people, who maybe didn’t have it as good, would still be stuck in minimum wage hell, trying to claw out for a better job in an economy that constantly failed the people who were supposed to inherit it someday. But most people were not Richard Gansey III.

He rubbed his eyes as he turned the key into the lock, dragged his suitcase in, left the keys on the stand next to the door and collapsed on the fancy leather Ethan Allen couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. The apartment was quiet, there was no light from the loft, which meant his roommate wasn’t around. That was all right. Gansey was tired. Not physically, though red-eye flights weren’t quite the best way to fly. He felt tired in spirit.

There was only so much one could do with a 35 million dollar trust fund.

He gazed out the floor to ceiling window into the DC cityscape. His apartment was a penthouse loft at the top of a hotel next to the warehouse district. It wasn’t as fancy as some of his peers may have liked, but Gansey wasn’t usually after fancy things. He cared about interesting things. Fun things. These days, nothing was fun anymore. Even the blinking lights of the city at 2am, something he used to delight in when he was younger and studying in Georgetown, no longer held the same spark. Gansey longed for adventure.

So when he picked up the phone call from Teresa, Helen’s chief-of-staff, he maybe shouldn’t have been filled with boyish excitement.

“Hi Dick,” Teresa’s voice was always clipped, to the point, no nonsense. He imagined she was sitting at her large, cluttered desk in Helen’s office, probably using a Bluetooth headset to talk to him while she typed purposefully into her other phone whatever last-minute changes Helen had for her sorties planned for the next day. Teresa, like Helen, was a woman of action. Helen would never have chosen her if she wasn’t efficient, no nonsense.

They were completely unlike Gansey.

“Hey Teresa.” He pulled his feet off the coffee table and walked over to the window to watch the DC lights some more. He hadn’t switched on the airconditioning yet and already, his polo shirt was starting to stick uncomfortably on his back. But the lights weren’t on either so he couldn’t look for the remote control.

“We may have a problem.”

Gansey tapped the glass quietly. “Oh?” He didn’t think Helen could ever have a problem. She was his mother’s chief of staff when his mother had been the senator. Helen knew the ins and outs of Congress after working for so long that Gansey had never thought there would ever be any sort of glitch now that she was the one taking up the congressional candidacy.

“There’s pictures, Dick,” Teresa said. Her voice had no inflection. Gansey wondered how she did that. He imagined if there were pictures that could hurt Helen Gansey’s candidacy that her staff would be up to the gills raising fire alarms to fix everything stat!

“Hmm. What kind?”

“The kind that could end her career before it’s even begun.”

Oh, that kind. Gansey didn’t think Helen actually had it in her. Gansey was usually the one doing things that could upset the family’s business and political dealings.

“If I help her,” he said carefully, thinking of how he could work this development in his summer, “do I get to know what those pictures contain?”

Teresa snorted. “You could probably ask Helen and she’d tell you.”

Hmm. Maybe Teresa didn’t know Helen so well after all. “Maybe. What do you need?”

“We found a lead of who may have taken them, and, I know you’re going to laugh over me saying this, but I think this needs, uhmm, the Richard Gansey touch for Helen to get through.”

He laughed at that. Did this mean that for the first time, his ambitious, headstrong, self-sufficient sister actually needed him? He didn’t want to be mean, though. This was probably the most fun he’d had all summer, and if obtaining these pictures was going to be difficult enough, he could seriously be entertained all the way up to Thanksgiving, for when he actually had to sit on a dinner table with his sister.

“Okay, what’s your theory?”

He listened patiently. In the end, Teresa shared the pictures’ contents. Helen had a wild weekend with some girlfriends back in college. Someone, she didn’t know who, videotaped her in some compromising positions that went against her campaign platform. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but this early in the race, it could potentially be harmful, especially when blown out of proportion. Helen is a woman, and women were almost always at a distinct disadvantage in chauvinistic American politics.

“We think the Russian mob may have connections to this; they’ve been helping the gun lobby and your family may be the first against it. If Helen wins, they could lose the state to the Dems on gun control laws.”

Gansey nodded. He knew all of that. “Do we have any details on who took it?”

“Yes,” Teresa answered, all clipped and neat and toneless again. Details were what she thrived on. “We have ears in Boston that one Joseph Kavinsky may actually be behind it. You remember him, bomb threats on 9/11 posted all over Youtube, that kind of guy.”

Unfortunately, Gansey did remember him and he wasn’t surprised at all. For a time, he had gone to school with Joseph Kavinsky. He wondered if Joseph knew Helen Gansey was his sister. He probably did.

“And I’m guess Mr. Kavinsky isn’t anywhere stateside right now?” he said, tapping the glass again. He leaned his head lazily. This could really be interesting.

“No,” Teresa answered. “But we think the pictures, maybe the only copy of them, is in a safety deposit box in Cabeswater Bank.”

Oh, now it was really interesting. The Gansey family was the majority stockholder of Cabeswater Inc, of which banking was just one of the services. He wondered why Helen was allowing her team to pass off something this potentially damaging to her devil-may-care little brother. It wasn’t that Gansey was a screw-up. He just didn’t have the same ambition that his parents harbored for him as they did for Helen. Pity, really. They were expecting him to take up the political mandate. Gansey just couldn’t be bothered.

“Why not just bribe the manager to pull it out for you?”

Teresa did not sound impressed. “Now imagine the scandal that would have created if it got out that we bribed a bank employee to flout secrecy laws.”

She did have a point. “Okay. But if I do this, I have to do this my way.” He listened as the receiver went silent, and guessed Teresa was probably either conferring with her team, or talking to Helen about how much damage they could take if Gansey fucked everything up.

Finally, the line unmuted. The voice he heard this time sounded tired. “Okay, little brother.”

Gansey beamed and watched his reflection in the glass. “Don’t worry, Helen. I’ll try not to blow up too many buildings.”

  


Gansey was still awake when his roommate, Ronan Lynch, finally came home. Even if he wasn’t awake, he was sure he would be because Ronan Lynch always announced his presence with the slamming of the front door hard enough to make teeth rattle. Ronan stomped to the stairs leading up the loft for good measure and stopped at the foot of the stairs when he noticed Gansey sitting on the couch in pajamas. Gansey watched quietly, as Ronan frowned, first at the fact that he was silently judging him because Gansey was always silently judging his friend’s activities in much the same way Helen judged his, and second for the fact that Ronan could never come to terms with himself whenever he saw Gansey drinking.

Gansey quite enjoyed his Glenlivet. He hid the bottle from Ronan whenever he drank because Ronan treated whisky like Mountain Dew, and Gansey didn’t enjoy twenty-one year old pours to go to waste, especially if it was just going towards Ronan Lynch’s alcoholism.

“Where’d you get that?” Ronan demanded.

He didn’t sound drunk, at least Gansey didn’t think so, and his posture asserted some semblance of self-awareness, which meant that Ronan would not shut up until Gansey shared the liquor. His expensive whisky was in danger.

Ronan advanced on the couch where Gansey lounged lazily, sniffing over Gansey’s head. “Where is it?”

Gansey drank his whisky purposefully, savoring every drop with closed eyes. He was perfectly aware of Ronan standing over him trying to find more whisky. He looked up, angling his jaw slightly as he gazed up at Ronan’s face barely inches from his. Ronan was surprisingly clean-shaven and did not smell like beer and vomit. Gansey thought he detected a whiff of aftershave under the musky scent of strong liquor. The piercing on his lower lip glinted in the pale yellow light of Gansey’s living room floor lamp.

Ronan Lynch was a little like Gansey: he was a trust fund baby, that could be easily seen in the way he swaggered around DC in his fancy BMW M6. He was rich and bored and maybe had too much free time, just like Gansey. Their similarities ended there. Gansey was the golden prince of an old moneyed political clan. Even though he chose to make nothing more of his life than to chase adventure, Gansey was the beloved prince.

Ronan was a prince in his own right. The middle child of an Irish mobster and a British TV actress, he was handsome, headstrong, intelligent. He was also a consummate addict. When his father was murdered under shady circumstances, the mafia elected to hand the reins of the family business to Ronan’s older brother, Declan, despite everything else, the trust, the multiple properties, the shares of stock, going to Ronan. Declan outlawed his younger brother from ever working for the family. Gansey sort of understood. Ronan was an unstable alcoholic thrill-seeker. He supposed the mafia needed someone who was more level-headed to run an organization that spanned continents. In a way, the Lynch family organization functioned very much like the Gansey political machinery.

Ronan scrunched his face, looming menacingly over Gansey. “Are you going to give me any of that shit?”

Gansey casually set his glass on the side table next to the couch, where his phone was. He really shouldn’t be wasting Glenlivet. “I will, if you do something for me.”

 

 

Gansey’s Glenlivet did not stand a chance. Ronan was on his sixth shot and had quickly decimated the whisky when he finally had a bright idea on what they could do with the Gansey family problem, the Helen situation, as Gansey had fondly referred to it.

“I just think,” Gansey said, swirling the amber liquid in his glass and leaning back on the couch, a study of careless abandon, “that bribing the manager isn’t exactly going to go over as well as one would think. What if the manager resigns? This just invites too many people into the problem.”

Ronan snorted. He was already mostly drunk, his long body draped over the other side of the couch. He had kicked off his boots so he could hike his feet up the back of the couch and nudge Gansey’s head with his large toe. Gansey made a face as if to say, _Your feet stink_ , and Ronan rolled his eyes as if to say, _Rich people feet never stink and you know that_.

They were a pair. Bored rich boys looking for excitement.

Ronan downed his shot suddenly and sat up. His eyes shone with the burst of inspiration and for one crazy moment, Gansey thought the steely glint shining off the twin hoops on his left eyebrow matched the suddenly mischievous twinkle in his impossibly blue eyes.

“We could rob your bank,” Ronan said quietly. The corners of his lips lifted in a smile that cut across his sharp features. He held out his glass and Gansey poured the shot, unable to contain himself.

“It has to be untraceable. None of this must get back to me. You must remember that we still own this company.”

Ronan scoffed, the action sloshing a bit of whisky onto his legs and soaking into his artfully ripped jeans. “Don’t be stupid. We have all the resources we’ll ever need to do this.”

His eyes shone with the excitement of the reckless venture tempered with inebriation. Ronan meant to use the resources of the Lynch family organization, and Gansey was sure the reach of the Lynches, not just in influence but in illegal activities, could very easily make that happen. All they had to do was find the right people in the family to do the dirty work.

Gansey couldn’t help but be drawn. This was Ronan Lynch in his element. Consummate addict, compulsive thrill-seeker. He adored the idea of robbing the bank. Quick, clean, untraceable. Gansey would get the pictures and his sister’s respect. Ronan would finally dip his feet into the family business. Declan would have no choice but to allow his brother to work for the family.

And if it all came down to money, the bank could always claim on the insurance. It was a win-win.

“What do you propose we do?”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The drive from DC to Henrietta takes 2 hours. A week after the night of drinking with Gansey, Ronan managed it with thirty-five minutes to spare, even though he was mostly sober. Speeding tickets were one thing, but if he got pulled over drunk driving, the amount of time it would take to weasel himself out of the arrest would be a waste. Usually, he had no problems getting arrested for whatever reason. It was a Lynch brother thing. One wasn’t a Lynch brother if he wasn’t somehow in trouble with the law, and Ronan was already so familiar with the backseat of police cruisers, he could probably consider it a second home. Even without involvement in the family business or Ronan’s incessant drinking, fighting and speeding, he and his younger brother, Matthew, got pulled over and hassled more times the average citizen. It came with the territory.

Right now though, he couldn’t get into Henrietta fast enough, and that meant no drinking, no drugs, and speeding at just the right times to avoid traffic stops. Ronan knew where all the hidden speed cameras and radar were, where the police liked to wait on the side of the highway to catch speeding vehicles. He knew the road from DC to Henrietta like the back of his hand. He came from there.

He and Gansey had gone to prep school together in Aglionby Academy in Henrietta, and the Lynch family estate was hidden up the mountains east at Singer’s Falls. Ronan no longer made the drive home as often when his father passed. Declan moved the center of the business to Boston, and Matthew and their mother lived in a separate DC townhouse. There was nothing really left in Henrietta for Ronan to go back to.

Except now there was, and his fingertips crackled with electric excitement at the proposition. Gansey would fund the whole affair quietly from DC to keep him out of the entire affair. Ronan would scout the remnants of Declan’s crew in Henrietta to handle the dirty work. Gansey had suggested Ronan stay in DC as well, to keep out of trouble and establish an alibi when shit got down, but Ronan was in it for the long haul. He wanted to do this. He needed to do it to prove to that shitstack brother of his that he was capable of orchestrating complex operations, that his attention span went beyond the need to get shitfaced or high.

The drive into town was almost nostalgic. Ronan had never wanted to leave, but there were conditions in his father’s will that he needed to fulfill if he wanted to keep what he got, the trust fund and the property. When Gansey moved to DC for college, Ronan decided to go with him than stay in Henrietta to simmer in his anger. There had been no point in staying if even Matthew and his mother were moving away.

Except now that he was here, there was.

He drove by the gates of his old school. Aglionby Academy still inspired the same hatred for the system that Ronan always had. Once upon a time, years ago, just days after Ronan discovered his father’s bloody, mangled, murdered body, he had shown up to the school gates with his wrists slit and vandalized the tall brick fences with his own blood. Prep school didn’t really do men like him, who were born to deal with the world using fists, guns and knives, any good, but it was a way to pass the time, just like the art degree that he never obtained in Georgetown was a way to pass time, between the next bottle, the next pill, the next fight in a darkened alley.

He passed by St. Agnes Catholic Church with a somber expression, his mind on the countless Sundays of Latin mass attended, first with his entire family, then with his brothers and mother. The sight of the church was like cool water to a fevered mind occupied by anger.

The bank was about a block from the church, next to a pizza parlor he used to frequent when he was in high school. It was a little jarring to pull over in the parking lot, take in the sights that he’d never gotten to see since he left Henrietta. The bank was closed by now, so there was no point trying to case it, and Ronan probably didn’t know the first thing about casing banks for a future attempt at robbing it. He would have to find someone in the organization to help him do that. He walked maybe another two blocks, lost in thought and nostalgia over his return, when he stopped. The row of shops came to an abrupt end on the street with the last establishment.

Lynch in Arms was the only gun shop in a town as tiny and rural as Henrietta. Niall Lynch opened the shop in the late eighties, when he eloped to the US with his TV actress wife. It was the beginning, the first of many legal firearms stores that would be opened that would front for laundering money from the illegal weapons trade in Northern Ireland, that much of the business, Ronan knew. Niall funneled high-powered machine guns and heavy artillery initially to the IRA, a kind of misplaced loyalty for his Irish roots (Ronan thought it was stupid—the IRA was a terrorist organization, and while he didn’t give a shit about terrorists, he did not appreciate them seizing Niall’s properties in Ireland upon his death). Later, the business flourished to supplying arms to the highest bidder. Declan had a good hand in that, maintaining control of a modest market share over the sale and supply of deadly weapons in Eastern Europe during the Balkan civil wars in Sarajevo and the Chechnya attacks, before expanding to the Middle East, where the bulk of the business currently lay. Ronan didn’t know the details but the family trust ballooned to the billions, so he wasn’t really complaining.

It was late afternoon; most of the shops on the strip would be closing at dusk. Ronan decided today was as good a day as any to see what he could find in terms of recruitment for Gansey’s heist. He entered the store.

Lynch In Arms, being the first shop the Lynches owned through legitimate means, didn’t appear to be any source of pride for Declan. Ronan remembered being in high school and walking in to the store once to pick out his first gun and feeling overwhelmed and spoiled for choice. That was no longer the case now. The shop occupied a modest floor area, but where before, glass cases displaying exquisitely crafted handguns, fancy hunting rifles that looked as beautiful as they were deadly, multi-barreled pistols that looked like a throwback from the Wild West, the shelves were now sparse with product. Some shelves still displayed an alarming number of semi-automatic weapons and a selection of vintage World War II grenades for collectors, but for the most part, the shop just looked old and tired, like the current management had simply kept it open for the sake of, and not bothered with any maintenance.

There was only one person working the counter, though Ronan spied at least three closed circuit cameras that followed his movement around the glass stands that showcased bullets, silencers, and telescopic sights. The storekeep was a young man, probably local, mostly around Ronan’s age. He was busy cleaning an old .35 Remington that looked like it got quite a lot of action during the last open season if the jacket fouling was any indication. His back was turned to Ronan though he half-turned when Ronan entered, and then went back to his work when he didn’t talk as he looked through the cases.

_ Careless bastard,  _ Ronan thought, as he easily opened one of the glass cabinet doors to examine a Glock 17. It reminded him of the first time he’d handled a gun, shooting empty cans in one of the fields behind the farmhouse, with his dad. He wanted to teach this useless piece of shit a lesson to pay better attention his father’s store.

 

He pretended to study the gun in his hand while eyeing the shopkeeper through the display case mirror. His back was still turned to Ronan, though, as he moved through the front counter display case to clean his rifle from a different angle, Ronan thought he caught a glimpse of a colorless eyebrow quirk and a blaze of stormy blue through the reflection of the display case the shopkeeper was facing.

“Can I help you?” The voice was soft and toneless, with only a tinge of Henrietta sneaking at the end of his vowels.

Ronan grunted and did not look up from the gun in his hand as he turned it over and then pretended to check the magazine and safety. He wondered if this guy was part of the organization or if he was just some hick hired to man the stores while the real thugs operated elsewhere.

“Ammo’s over here, behind the counter,” said the shopkeeper, still not looking up from his rifle. He certainly sounded like all of the other country boys manning store counters in all the other stores on the strip. Probably not a thug.

Ronan studied him through the reflection, his hand still on the Glock. The shopkeeper hunched over his rifle, the sound of his bore brush on steel filling the store with an annoying scratching sound that grated in Ronan’s ears. Definitely not a thug. The guy looked too thin to be a thug, if the sharp edges of his shoulder blades sticking up from his white t-shirt was to be any indication.

But if he worked in Lynch in Arms, he had to have known something. And at the moment, this loser was the only one on Lynch property that he could count on for his plans.

He thought of the gun in his hand and the useless shopkeeper in the counter.

One way to find out.

His body was still, his hand slow moving, furtive, eye on the shopkeeper as he moved the gun from the top of the cabinet.

And then several things happened all at once.

The first was that there was another hand on the Glock on top of his, gripping his fingers almost painfully. He felt more than heard the slow intake of breath against his ear as an arm snaked under his armpit and another hand pressed cold fingers to his throat, questing for his pressure point, probably an attempt to knock him out, before he heard the clatter of the bore brush against the far counter.

Ronan was no stranger to fights or having weapons pressed against his skin. There had been countless times that thugs in DC have tried to hold up the wrong person walking down a darkened alley and ended up with broken fingers when Ronan smashed their gun-toting hands against brick walls, or with bloodied, bruised jaws when he landed a well-placed elbow to his assailant’s face. His body reacted on instinct, elbow to the shopkeeper’s rib, before reaching back to grab a scrap of shirt or hair or his neck.

They scuffled in the shop, knocking against glass counters and spilling boxes of cartridge ammunition on the floor. The shopkeeper was unnaturally strong for his slight build, his thin, freckled hand crushing Ronan’s fingers against the gun. Ronan reeled back and slammed him against a display stand, knocking the breath out of the thin body. Ronan would have wasted no time pressing his advantage if he hadn’t heard the soft, lethal snick against his jaw. The shopkeeper still had his one hand on Ronan’s hand and the gun. His other pressed a serrated army knife against the juncture of his neck and jaw, right over his jugular. The metal glinted in the harsh clinical lights of the shop, and if Ronan looked through their reflection in the ruined display case cabinet hard enough, he could see the slightest cut reddening where his skin met the edge of metal.

“Don’t try anything funny,” the shopkeeper breathed into his ear, voice low, accent unmistakable. Ronan shuddered at the long, drawn out vowels as the other man’s left leg tangled around his to prevent him from struggling further.

“Fuck you,” he hissed. It should have been easy to pull out of the shopkeeper’s grasp, his wrists were thin, almost delicate, his build was scrawny, but now he held on to Ronan’s hand with a death grip. “Don’t you know who I am?”

He could see the man smile darkly in their reflection, the action incongruous with the youthful spray of freckles over his tanned cheeks and straight nose. “Yeah, I know you. You’re a thief trying to steal from my store.”

“Fuck you.” He angled his free arm and elbowed backwards again. The other man was unable to evade the blow as their bodies were flush against the display case, but if he felt any pain, the only sign of it was the curl in his lip, the slight flinch in his brow. “I’m Ronan Lynch, you asshole.”

The reaction was almost as instantaneous as when he was first attacked. The shopkeeper dropped his hand and pushed off against his body. Another snick and the knife disappeared into one of the many pockets on his army green cargo pants. Ronan shoved against him as he let him go, shock over his actions written over his face as the same stormy blue eyes fixated on the tiny red cut under Ronan’s jaw. He pressed a shaking finger against the skin and was gratified to see no blood come off.

Both he and the other man were breathing heavily. The shopkeeper's face was flushed under his tan.

The shopkeeper’s eyes were wide, his expression between thunderstruck and apologetic. “I—I’m sorry, Mr. Lynch, I didn’t recognize you,” he stammered, shoving his hands into his pockets. If he didn’t recognize Ronan earlier, the horror in his face told him he saw the Lynch family connection now.

Ronan dropped the gun on the counter and flexing his fingers. There was an oval-shaped red mark on the juncture of his thumb and first finger. That was going to be a bruise later. He eyed the other man, who still had the same aghast expression.

He was in his early twenties, maybe about the same age as Ronan, with deepset eyes, hollow cheeks and downturned lips. His brows appeared to be perpetually furrowed and colorless and there were freckles everywhere Ronan could see, down the long column of tanned neck and throat, disappearing off the neck of his white t-shirt and reappearing from the hem of his t-shirt sleeves, tiny constellations of sun-kissed spots snaking down lightly toned arms, delicate wrists and slender, boyish hands. He wore twin steel dog tags that Ronan recognized as US Army issue, so this guy was probably military-trained, and therefore it should not be a sore spot that Ronan lost a scuffle against him even though he seemed almost unnaturally thin. With his freckles and pale eyebrows, he reminded Ronan of those child soldiers in National Geographic photo spreads from the nineties Balkan wars. Ronan found him unbearably attractive.

“Parrish, huh,” Ronan grunted, glowering at the plastic store ID pinned to the left breast of the shopkeeper’s t-shirt. He massaged the sore spot on his hand where the shopkeeper had almost crushed his fingers into the gun.

“Yes, sir, Adam Parrish.” When he wasn’t trying to be all badass and hot, Parrish’s accent disappeared into the same toneless, clipped voice he had used when Ronan first entered the store.

Ronan glared at him. “You work for my brother?”

Adam Parrish’s brow furrowed even deeper. “Your bro—oh, Declan. Yes, sir, I work for him. Never met him, though. I’m on the Virginia network, through the O’Brien’s in DC.”

Ronan did not know who they were, but he guessed they may be thugs higher up the organization food chain. This Adam Parrish was probably some low-level street gangster that reported to the DC gang line. Ronan couldn’t figure out why Parrish would be stuck in rural Henrietta though. He looked the sort that belonged in the more dangerous, seedier Boston joints where the weapons of mass destruction amassed right under the FBI’s nose.

He supposed it was just as well that Parrish was on the lower rungs of the mafia brotherhood. Declan would’ve gotten wind of his plans pretty fast if Parrish was better placed in the organization.

“You ever done any shit for him yet?” Ronan asked, still eyeing Parrish as he fidgeted nervously with his dog tags. His eyes kept darting from Ronan to the abandoned Glock on the counter, probably shitting himself at the thought that he may get fired. In the Lynch family, getting fired meant getting every bone in his body broken, then tongue cut out, eyeballs gouged before gasoline was poured over the still living body and getting burned alive.

Parrish shook his head tersely. “N—no, sir. I haven’t—I mean besides the weapons stash here…” He trailed off, a tinge of pink coloring the tips of his ears.

Ronan grunted again, lip curling in disdain. Fucking fantastic. A rookie. Well, he supposed beggars couldn’t really be choosers.

“I’m here to give you an assignment.”

Adam Parrish’s eyes lit up, the stormy blue settling into a clearer, paler blue, his body almost sagging in his relief that he wasn’t going to get fired. “Yes, sir, I’ll do my best.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand enter Adam Parrish, my Draco in leather pants. :>


	3. Chapter 3

Adam Parrish didn’t expect to get lucky when he first received the Lynch in Arms assignment, but Ronan Lynch appearing at his store in rural, godforsaken Henrietta felt a little like the hand of providence or some other fatalistic shit he very seldom believed in much less subscribed to, especially in the line of work Adam had gotten into in the first five years of his adult life.

Like Ronan guessed, Adam was a Henrietta local, growing up in a dusty trailer park, the first exit off the freeway, fifteen minutes from the downtown. Unlike what Ronan probably thought, Adam Parrish was not a Lynch mafia henchman.

The FBI badge he hid in the zip pocket of his cargoes, the one just above his right knee sometimes felt too heavy to bear for his twenty-five years. Adam had been recruited into the agency straight out of MIT, the best and the brightest, the director had called them, when he and a handful of other graduates entered the service. Adam had an edge over his fellow graduates, with the year-long tour he spent in Iraq as a tactical planning specialist for a deep cover unit infiltrating Taliban-infested communities in the border with Syria the year he obtained his high school diploma. That meant he had immediate field experience of undercover work, tactical planning and strategy, and an intrinsic knowledge of high-powered weaponry that gave him a deep understanding of the illegal weapons trade that was the lifeline of the Lynch mafia organization.

By all accounts, he was a rookie, undercover on his first, extremely dangerous case. In truth, he had been in far more dangerous assignments riding in an army Jeep out of Mosul than he had ever been once he was actually in the Lynch organization. The hierarchy of the Lynch family enterprise meant that nobody new ever actually met Declan Lynch, the organization kingpin, without first going through a myriad henchmen intent on weeding out potential traitors in their midst.

Adam’s FBI commanding officer guided him to a leak in the organization in DC where a man named Gray worked for the O’Brien’s Sports Club. Gray was the one who vouched for Adam and guided him through the series of robberies he needed to commit in order to even get a meeting with the DC mob boss, and then helped him live through the hazing once he was actually in. Once O’Brien was satisfied with Adam’s loyalty though, he was unceremoniously shuttered to the Henrietta gun shop, told to watch over a weapons stash hidden in some valley east of town, and then subsequently forgotten.

It was his third month since the Henrietta assignment and Adam was itching for action. The hazing had left him with a broken clavicle that Gray had helped set because his cover, a down and out street hustler, couldn’t afford to bring the injury to be treated at a hospital, and that his FBI commanding officer had told him he needed to get used to in undercover jobs. It was a bitch to live through with minimal medical attention, but not wholly incapacitating. At least not like when the IED explosion in a job in Al Fatsi left him deaf in one ear, and the main cause of his honorable discharge from army. But it took too long to heal.

Once it did heal, Adam was left with mostly nothing to do beyond watching over a gun shop in a sleepy rural town. Once he finished the inventory of the weapons stash in Singer’s Falls, there really wasn’t much else to do. Gray told him to be patient: Singer’s Falls was where the Lynch family home was located, but the property was both huge and deserted. Adam found nothing, and his commanding officer didn’t allow him to break into any of the farmhouses on the property without probable cause that could lead to an arrest. Even the weapons stockpile was in a shed too far from the Lynch property to be considered remotely incriminating.

So when Ronan Lynch arrived at Henrietta with a proposition to rob the local Cabeswater Bank branch, Adam was almost certainly onboard. For one, it would look too suspicious if he didn’t agree, even though bank heists were hardly a common crime in the Lynch enterprise. The Lynches far preferred petty robbery of small targets, pawnshops, convenience stores and the like, than high profile targets like banks, because the robberies were really only a farce for recruits to prove their mettle. The real business was in the underground arms deals. Adam was meant to find links between manufacturers and the mafia, or the mafia and their clients.

But this heist was just as good. The few months he spent in DC working with Gray had already briefed him on the Lynch family history: Niall Lynch was the Irish gangster who built the organization from disparate Irish families dotting the Virginia state, armed them, organized them, and then set the family code. He had three sons by his TV actress wife: Declan, the eldest, who was indoctrinated in the family business, Ronan, the black sheep who squandered away his inheritance on drink and drugs, and Matthew, the sheltered youngest son who had no idea what his father and brothers had gotten themselves into. He knew that Ronan Lynch wasn’t in any way part of the enterprise. In fact, if Adam went by Ronan’s plans for the heist, it appeared the heist was meant to be a grand entrance, so to speak, for Ronan Lynch, for the organization to recognize his power. Probably to subjugate his brother, because Adam learned the Lynch family did not spill each other’s blood. They may kill others, and cause death and destruction through their sale of weapons to terrorists and warlords, but they did not hurt each other despite their hatred of each other’s guts.

That was alright though. One Lynch brother was as good as the next. Ronan may not be part of the enterprise, but his capture would be one of the best leverage the FBI could ever hope to have in arresting Declan Lynch. Adam needed to see this heist through in order to gather all the right evidence to hammer in all the nails to Ronan Lynch’s coffin.

So he planned. It was what he was good at.

Ronan brought with him the blueprints for the building where the bank was located. Like most of the commercial establishments in Henrietta, Cabeswater Bank rented a two-story shop unit in an old stone structure in the middle of town. Henrietta was built in the 1700s and prided itself in preserving its history, so much of the downtown commercial structures consisted of pre-war stone structures. Some, like the building for Cabeswater Bank, had been remodeled to give a more modern feel, but the slate gray stones, heavy wooden doors and steel grilles on its windows, were ever present, a constant reminder of colonialism and America’s history of violence.

Adam had never actually been into Cabeswater Bank. When he was a kid, his family had been too poor for its services—Cabeswater’s services were tailored to suit the more affluent student population of Aglionby Academy, especially since the scion of the family of Cabeswater Inc.’s owner, Richard Gansey III, went to Aglionby.

The blueprints told him nothing but theory of how the place was laid out. Here, on the first floor was the new accounts low counter, the tellering high counter, and the branch manager’s office. At the back, behind the manager’s desk, were the vault doors. Near the front was a spiral staircase that would lead to the check-clearing offices that typically operated to support banking services of rural bank branches. There was not much else, because the blueprint, one Ronan said he obtained from a source more reliable than the local library, was actually incomplete.

“Here,” he pointed into the corner of the first sheet where the edge of the vault room should be. Ronan’s brow furrowed as he glared at where Adam’s finger pointed. “This is a door. It can’t possibly lead to anywhere, because we know that the space next to this is another commercial establishment.” He pulled off his finger and bit his nail, thinking. “I’m pretty sure it’s a pawnshop.”

“It’s the pizza parlor,” Ronan said, nodding. “Nino’s.”

“No, Nino’s is to the left. Next to the high counter. There’s another commercial space to the right. It used to be a pawnshop before I arrived here. Rudy’s or something.” He shook his head. Ronan Lynch did not know how to read blueprints evidently. “We need to know whether that door actually leads to the next commercial space, or it’s a door on the floor.”

“Like a trapdoor,” said Ronan, looking up to his face.

Adam nodded. “Right. Which means there could be a basement we know nothing about.”

“My source doesn’t mention a basement,” Ronan muttered, skeptical. Adam studied his face.

Ronan Lynch looked nothing like the pictures he had seen when he had reviewed the Lynch family case. Oh he looked enough like Declan Lynch in pictures that it was impossible to mistake them as anything but related in the first degree. Ronan had the same sharp, angular features as Niall, the same straight, aristocratic nose, the sharp cheekbones and jaw line that could shred Adam’s skin if he got too close, the same arched brows and lips pressed thin by stress or anger or a strange mixture of both. But where Declan looked smooth, like a politician with a winning smile and a devious twinkle of his winter blue eyes, Ronan looked like a snake, the kind that warned people from afar that he was dangerous, with his double-pierced brow, the pointed steel spike under his lip that jumped and glinted in the light and clicked against his teeth whenever he talked, the curled hooks of a massive black tattoo sneaking up the neck of his black muscle tee, and around well-muscled arms. The same arm that had elbowed Adam in the ribs painfully not three hours ago.

He winced slightly at the memory. There was going to be a bruise there later, but he supposed he got it just as well as he gave, because Ronan’s right hand, the one that held the Glock, was mottled with finger-shaped bruises, and Adam had a hard time tearing his eyes from the half-inch of raw red line caused by his knife against Ronan’s jaw. For all that Ronan Lynch looked dangerous and threatening, Adam was sure this soft rich boy had never seen action outside of a gym mat.

No, he was sure Ronan Lynch had nothing to do with the Lynch illegal arms enterprise, and Adam almost felt bad that he would be embroiled in the arrests just to get his brother and bring down the family business.

Ronan did not miss the fleeting expression of pain that passed through his features. His blazing blue eyes narrowed dangerously. “What?”

Adam frowned and shook his head to clear his thoughts. He had been staring. “Nothing, sir.”

He straightened up. Staring at the blueprint for the past seventy-five minutes made his head swim. He hadn’t had to do this since Mosul. A chemical engineering degree in MIT guaranteed chemical formulations to memorize, not blueprints to analyze and speculate on.

“We need to think about how we’re going to find out about this door,” Adam said, rubbing his left temple with the pad of his thumb. It was 8PM. Most of the other stores on the strip, except perhaps the pizza parlor, would already be closed. It was time for him to be closing the shop soon too.

Ronan frowned back at him, folding the blueprints when he noticed Adam no longer looking at them. “I’m staying in town,” he announced breezily.

Adam just looked at him, not caring either way. Even if Ronan Lynch had no plans to stay in Henrietta, he was sure he could pull off this investigation on his own with just the right amount of time on the internet and in the local library.

“We need to be able to plan this shit with no interruptions.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “This gun shop doesn’t get any traffic most days of the week, sir. I doubt anyone’s going to walk in on us talking about robbing the bank next door.”

Ronan snorted. “Yeah, no one’s going to notice two dudes looking at blueprints of a bank all fucking day. This shit is visible from the windows, Parrish.”

Adam didn’t think anyone would be able to make what was on the blueprints anyway if they just happened to glance at them through the windows or the glass pane on the door from the outside, but he conceded that the CCTV might give them away after the fact, if the police start investigating through cameras all over the strip. Ronan Lynch did have a fair point.

“Where do you stay?” he asked politely, picking up the keys to the register and the display cases. He found the Glock that Ronan had taken and replaced it back in the shelves, and then locked each cabinet. Then he proceeded to pick up the litter of cartridge ammo on the floor, busying himself with the motions of shopkeeping to maintain the charade of being a legitimate business’ storekeeper.

“Warehouse district. Monmouth Manufacturing. You know where it is?” The imperious eyebrow arched with two steel hoops threading through dark brow hair at Adam. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes again.

“I’m local, sir. I live down the block, at St. Agnes. Monmouth Manufacturing is a walkable distance from there.”

Ronan nodded approvingly. “Good. Then I want to see you there in the morning, 10 o’clock. And we can resume planning. You don’t need to open the shop.”

Adam shook his head minutely as he finally gathered the last of the cartridges and set them back in their boxes. “Cheng takes me over the next two days, but I have another job in the morning. I won’t be able to make it ‘til 3.”

“What? I thought you worked exclusively for the enterprise.” Ronan sounded affronted. Adam waved his hand dismissively.

“Eh, we all gotta feed ourselves, Mr. Lynch, and this gig doesn’t quite cover my rent, much less food and sustenance. I haven’t been paid any good shit since this place hardly sees any action, if you know what I mean.”

Ronan didn’t know what he meant, Adam didn’t want to waste any time to explain.

“I’ll be there at 3, sir.”

“Whatever,” Ronan said with a lazy sigh, sounding extremely put upon.

Adam nodded. It was whatever. “We’ll need to case the place, and stake it out for when there’s a glut of cash.”

“I’ll handle the casing—“

“No, you won’t,” Adam interrupted smoothly. Ronan glowered at him, curse-filled protest at the tip of his tongue. Adam held his hand up. “Look at you, sir. With your piercings and tattoo and your rich boy features, you’re going to stand out like a sore thumb among all the locals doing their banking.”

Now Ronan was really affronted. “Rich boy features, my ass. And I suppose you’re proposing to do the casing? I doubt you bleeding heart trailer trash type can afford their services.”

Adam shut his eyes and told himself that Ronan Lynch did not know he was from the Henrietta trailer park at Antietam Lane. He told himself he was no bleeding heart. And he reminded himself that it had been years since he pulled himself out of the trash he came from and rose above everything the trailer park stood for.

“I mean, we need to find a third partner, sir. Someone who can blend in more easily with the locals. Someone who’s also probably going to act as our getaway driver once we get the shit in the vault.”

Ronan looked like he was about to argue. Adam could tell his trust issues probably arose from living with a mafia family all his life, but Adam knew just who he could approach that would treat the matter with utter discretion and fidelity to his cause.

“Don’t worry, you’ll meet him tomorrow. I promise, this will help us in achieving your goals, sir.”

“My fucking goals my ass, Parrish,” Ronan snorted, and then shook his head. “Stop calling me sir and I’ll probably agree to this shit.”

“Yes, sir,” Adam replied automatically, as he locked the last of the cabinets, and then moved to the front of the store to pull down the metal shutters, stopping it halfway to let Ronan out, and then he skipped out from under it and then pulled it all the way down, before securing the bolt lock, and the heavy steel padlock.

He heard Ronan curse at him, almost lyrically, again over the use of “sir” and “Mr. Lynch”, as if being polite was a slur, an insult to how extremely badass he perceived himself, and then he was walking to the charcoal gray BMW parked on the front of the store. He took one bored look at the parking ticket tucked under the wipers, tugged it off and tore it to a million pieces before scattering it to the pavement. And then, he was folding his long body into the car, slamming the door and peeling off into the night.

Adam shook his head, and tugged on his helmet, rounding the property to the back, where the parking lot was situated. His Ducati Monster 821 was five years old, purchased second hand, and one of the few more costly luxuries Adam afforded himself, when he was discharged from the Army. It wasn’t as practical as a car, but it got him to places better than if he had bought a cheap second-hand sedan, and the motorcycle chic usually ended most casual conversations in polite company. Adam liked to keep it that way.

St. Agnes was actually just three blocks from Lynch In Arms, but Adam still needed to report back to Boston on the progress of his assignment. These were things he couldn’t do living above a church. He didn’t feel it appropriate to be spying on one of the church’s biggest patrons, and most faithful flock, while living above their house of worship.

Because Adam knew, from the time he was in high school, that Niall Lynch, his beautiful wife, and his three sons, were devout Catholics and St. Agnes had been their church. Adam had been living above St. Agnes for the past ten years.


End file.
